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Transcript
Do you want to do a great job at work, but you find that you’re responding to requests from other people? You’re putting out fires and dealing with small issues, so that you’re not getting to the really important and fulfilling work?
As this happens, you get busier and busier. And this may lead to making mistakes. It might create some tension with your colleagues or maybe your friends and family. It might mean that you start to feel ill. You get really stressed.
So why does this happen? It happens because we say yes to so many things. And why do we say yes? Well, often because we want people to like us. So we say yes to them.
I think that this is particularly a problem in Japan where there is the emphasis on the “wa” — the group harmony.
In fact, a Japanese lady who I’m coaching in communication skills at the moment said to me the other day that she finds it easy to say no at work because she works in a global company and not a Japanese one.
Now if you feel that you’re saying yes to too many things and you’d like to say no a little bit more, I have two suggestions for you.
So the first is to propose an alternative.
Tomoko Akiyama contacted me about the topic for the first column in Nikkei Style’s Woman Smart. And the topic that she suggested was something that I didn’t really know a great deal about. It would have meant a lot of research. And I thought that it wouldn’t be such a convincing article because it wasn’t something that I felt so passionate about.
So even though my immediate reaction was that I wanted to say yes, after a little bit of thought, I decided to propose an alternative. And, in fact, I proposed the alternative of saying no. And you can read about that in Woman Smart. It’s online now.
So one way is to propose an alternative in the task, but also you could propose an alternative as in someone else does that task.
So for example, I was a translator for many years. And in 2015, I decided to focus purely on communications skills training and coaching. Nevertheless, at least once a month someone contacts me asking for translation. So now I propose a different person. I refer them to someone else who can help them with the request. So proposing an alternative is one suggestion.
Now a lot of people say to me “Well, when my boss comes to me asking me for something, I find it very difficult to say no to them.”
You may find that you’re already overloaded with work. Now it could be that your boss doesn’t fully understand the extent of the work that you already have. So one thing that you can do is to clarify how much work you already have. When the boss comes to you with the request, say “I understand that you’d like me to finish this report by Friday. Right now, these are the tasks that I’m working on. So considering this workload, how would you like me to prioritize to get the best work done?”
So that is one way that you can approach it. Now you may think “Well, actually my boss doesn’t like to be asked for advice in that way.” So it could be that you propose an alternative, which was the first suggestion that I gave to you.
So, you have a couple of suggestions –propose an alternative or ask for advice. I hope these help you to say no more often.